Waiting around for Frank Ocean's next album to drop has become something of a music fan's purgatory these last few years. The man teases a release date; it passes. He posts a cryptic livestream of a woodshop to his website; nothing happens. It's a cycle Ocean producer Malay addressed yesterday in a Reddit forum with the explanation "Art cannot be rushed."
Fair enough. If we can't rush it, though, what's an impatient, social media-fluent Frank Ocean devotee to do? (Aside from the well-established practice of expressing frustration in the form of Twitter memes, of course.)
Well, get this new app, for one. (650)82OCEAN, designed by UC Davis engineering student Shahzeb Khan, is essentially a bot that scours the web for Frank Ocean-related material and, if you hand over your digits, it'll text you the moment a new record goes live.
From the website's "about" section:
This service automatically looks at Spotify, iTunes, and Twitter for the latest in Frank Ocean news. The second it detects that a new album has gone live, it will automatically send everyone a text with the link for the album. It last checked for new music 7 minutes ago. There are currently 16,660 people who are eagerly awaiting for its arrival. Your number sits in a secure database, and you can stop the texts anytime by replying "stop".
That's right, just give the nice robot your phone number, and you can rest easy with the knowledge that you won't miss at thing. The fun part here is imagining what those of us who sign up for such a service will do with the, I don't know, three-minute lead we'll have on everyone else with an internet connection. Will weddings halt at the altar? Brain surgeons pause mid-operation to remove their gloves and smash that download button? Personally I'm imagining at least one air horn going off, and probably someone running into the lobby of a large building, shouting "FRANK OCEAN ALBUM!" the way one might normally shout "FIRE!" and then, you know, chaos ensuing -- all, of course, against a backdrop of Frank Ocean's sweet baritone.
